


cobblestones

by Rhyolite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: (the author did not do research. the author googled some things), Canon Era, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Printer Enjolras, Slightly more historically accurate than the author's last fic, mentioned - Freeform, oh yeah, probably, specifics kept vauge in the name of historical accuracy, the author did Research for this fic!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 02:31:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19097941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyolite/pseuds/Rhyolite
Summary: Gavroche, in the year before the barricade.





	cobblestones

**Author's Note:**

> ~~Happy~~ barricade day!

**July, 1831.**

Gavroche outgrew his shoes, and he gave away his last ones, so now he runs through the streets barefoot. The cobblestones don't hurt his feet much: years of walking and running have callused them so that the soles of his feet are tough. It's when he's running, barefoot, that he first notices the print shop.

It's not as if he hasn't noticed it before; it's been around for a while, but before, there haven't been throngs of people inside.

He skids to a halt, sticks his hands in the pockets (there's a roll in one, stolen from a baker and still holding on to the last, lingering heat from the oven), and walks forward to get a better look. Through the window, he can see a group of people who he assumes to be students by how they're dressed. One of them, with blond hair, is saying something.

Gavroche watches for a while, but becomes bored when it's clear that they aren't going to do anything with the big press and boxes of type in the room, so he wanders off. He sits in a garden, and eats his roll, shooing away the birds who would steal it from him.

 

**August.**

Gavroche encounters the two boys in August. By then, he's obtained another pair of shoes, and they clop nicely against the stone of the street as he runs. He circles around to where he left the two boys once he (and the stolen loaf of bread) have been forgotten, or at least labeled a lost cause.

He rips it in rough thirds with his hands, and stuffs one in his mouth. “Here," he says, holding the rest out.

The two boys take the bread, hesitantly. The older eats it quickly - he's already seen enough people who wouldn't think twice about grabbing a nice chunk of bread from a gamin - but the younger one eats slower, and wipes his nose on his sleeve between bites. The sleeve is silvery with snot and brown with dust by now, which gives Gavroche an idea.

“We're going to go swimming," he says.

The boys blink. The younger stuffs the rest of the roll in his mouth, chews (which requires some effort; there was quite a bit of the roll left) and says, “I don't know how to swim."

Gavroche swallows his bread, bobbing his head like a pigeon. “It's easy - just move your hands like this." He demonstrates, in the way that he vaguely remembers Eponine showing him by a stream years ago, before they moved to Paris and he moved to the elephant.

The boys look at him with wide eyes.

“Fine," he says, “we don't have to swim - I'll teach you how later; remind me - but we're going to go see the rafts, at least."

The walk, laughing and swinging their arms, down to the bridge at Austerlitz.

On their way, Gavroche sees two of the students handing out pamphlets. “They run a print shop," he explained airily, and grabs a pamphlet. “They like to pass out these things."

At the bridge, they spend the afternoon poking around the rafts, and, when they get tired of it, take off their clothes and run to wade in the water up to their knees. The laundresses rage, and yell, and curse, and Gavroche laughs and hurls insults back.

 

**September.**

In September, a vendor selling meat pies starts trying to sell them in the square near the elephant, and Gavroche decides that he wants  a pie, so he launches a plan.

It's the first time he's one into the print shop, and it's stuffy inside, and smells like ink and paper.

“Hey," he says to one of the students, and points to a stack of pamphlets. “Gimme some of those. I’ll give ‘em out."

“Oh. Um, sure," the student says.

Gavroche holds out his hand.

The student blinks, and then understanding dawns. “Bossuet! I need a few sous!"

Gavroche grins, and takes the coins and the pamphlets, and then he's trotting out the door - the promise of a meat pie in one pocket, and the pamphlets under his arm.

 

**October.**

The temperatures drop, and Gavroche goes to visit his family.

“What are you doing here?" his mother asks.

He shrugs, and takes half of a meat pie out of his pocket, bought with coins he earned from passing out pamphlets for the Amis de l'ABC. The pocket is question is now stained with gravy, and sticky, but he doesn't care. He can wash it off later, if he wants, and antagonize the laundresses more. Or he can just leave it.

His mother asks greedily if he has more pies, and when he says no (licking his fingers) that he doesn't, and that she should go get one if she wants one, she grunts and settles back with a novel.

“Why are you here?" Eponine asks, when he meets her on the stairs. It's just as sharp a question as Mme. Thenardier's, but in a different way - also bluntly, but blunt and caring, instead of blunt and uncaring.

Gavroche shrugs, and hands her the other half of the pie, which was stuffed in a different pocket, which is now equally adorned with a gravy stain.

 

**November.**

November means slush on the streets, and icy air wafting through the walls of the Gorbeau tenement (not that he would stay there; it's a place that's just for the occasional visit, just to make sure that everyone's not dead. He doesn't know, sometimes, why he bothers to check. He sees Eponine and Azelma on the streets enough, and it's not like his mother will give him anything but a glare and ask if he's brought anything back. His father he avoids.)

The print shop's walls aren't as drafty, and there's usually a fire. At first, he just sits on the steps and gets in the way, but he's eventually invited to come inside and take this bundle of pamphlets to that person.

He mostly just takes the proffered bundle of papers and the coins offered, skims one off the top to read, hunched in a doorway and sounding out every other word, or stuff in his waistcoat for insulation if he can't (or doesn’t want to) read it. The rest go to the other gamins, who help him pass them out.

“Hey! You!" he calls at a student in a green coat, and shoves a pamphlet at him. “This is for you!"

The student looks down, confused, and tries to disagree with him, but Gavroche is already off, already stuffing a pamphlet between the cushions of a nearby carriage. The owner of the carriage chases him away, yelling, but picks up the pamphlet once Gavroche (and the memory of having handfuls of mud and mouthfuls of taunts flung at the carriage) is safely away.

Gavroche steals a roll from a baker, and throws a pamphlet at him, and stuffs the roll into his pocket.

 

**December, 1832.**

There's only a small fireplace in the print shop, but there's a larger one in the Musain, so the Amis meet there, and Gavroche follows. He doesn't come to every meeting, but he comes with his own rhythm, even if it's a rhythm discernible to none but him, so no one knows whether he'll be running on frozen streets, in the elephant, or telling Joly and Jehan about the frozen sparrow that he found and flung at a carriage.

Courfeyrac has apparently found a friend, and Marius joins the group. Gavroche thinks that he's silly, but can't be blamed for it, poor thing. Some people are just made that way, he tells Marius, who frowns.

Gavroche grins, and demands to learn how the printing press works, and is told that no, he may not work the press; he'll break it.

 

**January.**

In January, the print shop has more customers that aren't interested in some nice pamphlets, so Gavroche and his boys decide to sneak into a theatre.

“I was the sea, once," he boasts. “They made me and a bunch of other kids be under this blue cloth and run around and be waves."

“Maybe there'll be another sea in this play and we then can be the sea, right?" the youngest boy asks.

Gavroche nods, and tells them about how he'd once watched a riot from the rafters of a theatre, and the boys listen, wide-eyed.

They sneak into the theatre, and there's no sea and the person at the door doesn't welcome the suggestion that they be hills, so they leave that entrance and sneak in another.

The play is everything they expected: there's puns, and a few sword fights and a duel or two. In the street outside the theatre, they reenact the sword fights and the duel, much to the aggravation of the other pedestrians.

 

**February.**

Apparently, Marius saw some girl in the Luxembourg Gardens, and now goes there every day. Gavroche is curious, so he follows him, and isn't disappointed.

Marius sits on  bench, apparently reading a book, but really gazing at a brown-haired girl in a green dress.

Gavroche observes for a few minutes, and then climbs a tree. From the branches, he can see the two boys he shares his elephant with fish a pastry out of the swan pond, and eat it, and he can see when the old man that the girl (who Marius has been staring at for the last fifteen minutes) was walking with drop his handkerchief as they exit the Gardens.

Marius picks up the handkerchief, and looks at the initials.

“She must be named Ursule!" he murmurs to himself, and then smells the handkerchief.

Gavroche crows with laughter, and almost falls from the tree.

 

**March.**

The print shop is gathering more an more energy, now, the pamphlets getting more and more pointed. Sometimes Gavroche thinks that he can hear it crackling, imagines that everyone there is burning with... something.

He doesn't see a lot of that something when he sits on top of the elephant and surveys his square, but he doesn't say anything. He doesn't know why he keeps quiet, but he does.

 

**April.**

In April, the flowers start to bloom, and so does the cholera.

Gavroche can see rows or houses with their windows barred from where he sits on top of the elephant, and he can sense some of that crackling anger than was absent before.

The younger of the two boys is sick - he seems dehydrated, and his face is hot.

 

**May.**

Marius asks Gavroche to deliver a letter to the girl he likes in exchange for a few sous, so Gavroche agrees.

He doesn’t read it, because he opened it, saw the words ‘my dearest Cosette,’ realized that the girls name must be Cosette and not Ursule, and closes the letter right back up, because he does _not_ want to read something that starts with the words ‘my dearest Cosette.’

In May, the cholera epidemic continues.

The younger of the two boys dies.

Gavroche helps his brother drag his body to one of the mass graves that have sprung up, because there’s no chance of him being buried in one of the graveyards. They toss a wilted handful of flowers (stolen from a churchyard) in with him, and then they wipe their noses, and leave.

 

**June, 1832.**

In June, General Lamarque dies.

In June, Gavroche helps with the building of the barricade.

In June, Gavroche identifies Inspector Javert.

In June, Gavroche goes outside of the barricade to get more ammunition from the fallen soldiers.

In June, Gavroche dies.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos make me super happy! <3


End file.
